SOCIALIST PARTY

In October 1989, reformers in the old communist party changed the party's name from the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party to the Hungarian Socialist Party. In that restructuring, some of the most conservative hardliners in the party formed another organization that carried on the name of the old. But although reformers hoped that the name change and a new emblem (the red carnation replacing the red star) would signal discontinuity with the past, the slogans and iconography of their election posters bore the legacy of the paternalism characteristic of state socialism.